“Never — not once — did it say …”

“Never — not once — did it say …” February 1, 2004

If you're Kenneth Pollack or David Kay, it makes sense for you to point out now that you were not alone in vastly overestimating Iraq's alleged stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein's alleged capacity for making more.

But once again they seem to be, well, overstating their case.

It is true that most intelligence agencies believed Saddam Hussein had something — but they also were continuously shocked by the specificity and extremity of the claims the Bush and Blair administrations were making about Iraq's WMD capabilities. The rest of the world, and the majority of intelligence agencies, did not share the American/British view on a host of claims: the aluminum tubes, the 45-minute attack, the killer transcontinental drones, the mushroom cloud smoking gun.

The international community did share suspicions about Saddam Hussein — which is why most countries were eager to hear Colin Powell present what was touted as America's "strongest case." What they got instead was a collection of previously refuted claims.

The idea that the Bush/Blair claims about the nature of the Iraqi threat reflected, as one commenter put it responding to a post below, "a broad consensus among all available intelligence sources" is revisionist history. Consider once again Thomas Ricks' profile of retired Gen. Anthony Zinni in The Washington Post. Here's an excerpt that seems very hard to reconcile with this idea of a preexisting "broad consensus":

He was alarmed that day to hear Cheney make the argument for attacking Iraq on grounds that Zinni found questionable at best:

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," Cheney said. "There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us."

Cheney's certitude bewildered Zinni. As chief of the Central Command, Zinni had been immersed in U.S. intelligence about Iraq. He was all too familiar with the intelligence analysts' doubts about Iraq's programs to acquire weapons of mass destruction, or WMD. "In my time at Centcom, I watched the intelligence, and never — not once — did it say, 'He has WMD.' "

Though retired for nearly two years, Zinni says, he remained current on the intelligence through his consulting with the CIA and the military. "I did consulting work for the agency, right up to the beginning of the war. I never saw anything. I'd say to analysts, 'Where's the threat?' " Their response, he recalls, was, "Silence."


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